On her way home from a bad day at work and a disappointing drinks date with a sleazy social media influencer (Hidenobu Abera), college student and part-time waitress Fumika (Akari Takaishi) finds a bullet casing on a stairway. She unthinkingly picks it up, not realising that her own suppressed rage and need for vengeance will instantly connect her through this object to the ghost of Kudo (Masanori Mimoto), a recently murdered hired assassin with his own load of unresolved emotional issues. Luckily, supernatural happenstance in this action-comedy charmer from Japan will help both of them to grow as people, or in Kudo’s case an ex-person. It turns out that Kudo can inhabit Fumika’s body at will and effectively use her as a karate-chopping, gun-slinging martial arts meat puppet in order to right wrongs, fight bad guys and eventually help him avenge his own murder. Fun!

Star Takaishi and director Kensuke Sonomura have collaborated before on the successful franchise Baby Assassins (wherein Takaishi plays a professional contract killer who poses as a normie, basically the inverse of her character here). Sonomura was the action director for three Baby Assassins features, which might explain that this, his third gig as a main director, feels more weighted towards scenes that showcase fisticuffs and fancy fight choreography rather than character development and emotional nuance. But that’s fine because Takaishi has charisma to burn and an impressive range; she’s equally convincing as a hapless student screaming in shock at the destruction being wrought around her as she is as a dead-eyed killer when Kudo inhabits her body. Meanwhile, Mimoto, a Japanese action film stalwart, is compellingly soulful as a murderer experiencing flickers of conscience rather late in life who hopes he might be a good influence not just on Fumika but also his former protege Kagehara (Mario Kuroba).

On the whole, this feels targeted more at a masc-centric audience; nevertheless, the script by Yugo Sakamoto hinges on key scenes where women’s right to not be degraded and injured by men are championed. Fumika/Kudo, for example, take on her friend Maho’s abusive boyfriend, then later battle some evil scumbags who drug women so that men can rape them while they’re unconscious. Also, it’s good to see that Fumika spends most of the movie in tracksuit trouser, a puffer coat and a knitted beanie instead of some kind of nymphet-adjacent outfit designed to titillate viewers.